Augmentation of Biotech Products

Bioinformatics Approach for Bacterial Hydrogen Energy Augmentation

The objective of the project is to improve the productivity and processivity of microbial hydrogen production by using various bioinformatics approaches. Hydrogen is a sustainable energy supply, which will reduce and conceivably even eliminate hydrocarbon use. Hydrogen can be produced by many methods and in this proposal efficient microbial biohydrogen production from industrial wastes will be focused. This method of production currently has many limitations. The approach will focus on a thorough study of the hydrogen-producing microbes in terms of their genomics, proteomics and metabolomics. It may be noted that, for many hydrogen producers, the entire sequence as well as other information (such as pathways) are available. Using this information an attempt will be made to get thermodynamically efficient hydrogen production system. To start with E.coli will be used as model organism and extended to Carboxydothermus hydrogenoformans. Currently we have completely reannotated E.coli and the data is available at REcdb.